


The Once And Future Rick

by Vituperative_cupcakes



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Gen, Morty does not get over it, after Rick goes to jail
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-21
Updated: 2015-11-21
Packaged: 2018-05-02 16:01:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5254514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vituperative_cupcakes/pseuds/Vituperative_cupcakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Be good Morty...be better than me.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Once And Future Rick

They never got Rick back.

Beth eventually stopped blaming Jerry for it. She had to. They all just grew back into their pre-Rick lives like flesh over a gaping wound, almost-not-quite covering the scar.

All of them.

Except Morty.

He could never really stop hating his father for it, even though Jerry never stopped denying he had really turned Rick in.

Morty found that without Rick around, his parents were different people. Jerry stopped being so insecure about his stupidity and got a job at an ad agency founded by Blorpmorphians, who proved much more receptive to Jerry's pitches than humans ever had.

Beth found that Greeples actually had a physiology not unlike the common horse, and so rose up in the medical world.

Summer, too, thrived in the new earth. Though sometimes she and Morty exchanged looks of mutual loss, she grew adjusted to her new life and even started attending community college.

Morty didn't grow. He festered.

It hadn't hit him hard when they first touched down on the new earth, Rickless and adrift. It hit him after he woke up the next morning and found that his entire family, minus one person, was at the breakfast table. There was no place set for Rick, not even a chair where he would have been.

Morty fell to his knees and cried and cried.

They tried to help, they did. Beth held him that first day. Jerry tried out more male-bonding things than he ever had while hunched over in Rick's shadow. Even Summer took the odd moment out to sit through intergalactic cable(Ball Fondlers now had a spin-off with just the lizard guy.)

And Morty tried to meet them halfway. He did.

But part of him wouldn't let go. Part of him still screamed “Rick's coming back!” Part of him wouldn't let Morty move on, or let anyone close again.

High school was a wash. He barely passed. College was similarly unfulfilling. Rick's views on school had seeped into Morty's subconscious, and he felt he couldn't make himself take it seriously at all. He stagnated at home, passing through a series of dead-end jobs.

Then one day Jerry cleaned out the garage.

Morty had a feeling they had only left it as it was for him, and perhaps they felt he had grown beyond it. He hadn't. He felt like he had been knifed in the gut.

Jerry stood at the door, not apologetic. That was the old Jerry. The new Jerry stood with the gentle firmness and told his son that it was time to move on.

The old Morty spat in his face and called him a few choice phrases. It was almost worth seeing Jerry back away in shock, hearing Rick's bile spill out of his son. Morty ran upstairs and slammed the door.

He had never put it to concrete thought, but he realized that he had been hoping for the council of Ricks to come by and attempt to take some of Rick's equipment, so he could bargain with them. And now he had to confront the fact that they never would.

After midnight, he crept downstairs to see if there was anything left to salvage.

The garage looked like any other garage now. The weed wacker stood in the corner, Summer's Nissan sat to the left of an oil stain. Morty looked at it all and felt the whimpers start in his chest.

No. No crying anymore.

Morty patted around, feeling for secret compartments or buttons or anything at all. He found a rusty nail with his hand. Nursing the scratch, Morty sat down on the cooler.

With a hiss, the cooler opened a side panel.

Morty was shaking as he got on his knees and pried away the panel. They had used the cooler a thousand times and never seen this.

Something that looked like a cross between a can opener and a remote control lay in the recess. Morty nearly dropped it. While trying to recover, he accidentally pressed a button and a green, minty-fresh ray hit him in the face. Morty squawked and dropped the gun, rubbing his face.

He still had flesh. He wasn't burning or melting. That wasn't necessarily reassuring, because maybe it was one of those delayed-effect weapons that let you go for 48 hours before blowing up your pancreas like a balloon.

When nothing happened for an hour, Morty gingerly put it back and went upstairs and got in bed.

The next morning, Morty knew his pancreas was fine. And he knew what a pancreas was. And where it was. And what every other organ in the body did. And when he looked out the window and recognized what type of tree was outside his window, down to the genus and phenotype, Morty realized what had happened.

Maybe it was a present Rick had been working on. Something to make Morty smarter, something he'd been saving as a surprise.

Or maybe it was just one of his many wacky experiments that simply had this as an unintended side effect. Maybe it wouldn't last more than an hour.

By nightfall, Morty had read every book in the house and was so brain-thirsty he wanted to scream. His new mind craved information, but reader's digest and the mad libs Jerry bought by the ton did not sate it. The internet brought only temporary relief, before long he couldn't stop correcting Wikipedia articles.

By the end of the week Morty could name every element on the periodic table and was sick of living with his parents. Jerry was beginning to look at him with the same Rick-fear, he could smell Morty's increased intellect. And Beth...Beth just looked sad.

Morty moved into a storage unit he'd rented and began working. Out of scrap and discarded computer parts, he built a climate-control unit that doubled as a bed. The hardware store that employed him called to say that since he hadn't come in all week, he shouldn't bother coming in at all. This didn't bother him, because Morty realized he was better than work. He was better than all of them.

By Wednesday he had gathered a small city of spare parts and had to rent another storage unit. This wasn't a problem, since he'd build a counterfeit-dollar printer earlier. He didn't need to bother about trivial things like money, or bathing. He was building the most important machine of all:

he was building the machine that would bring back Rick.

Morty had never seen with such clarity before. He knew exactly what parts went where, what he needed to do. It was like putting a jigsaw together, only he could actually do this.

Morty was grinning and grimy with triumph as he fitted the last circuit board and pressed a button.

The ensuing explosion leveled the storage unit.

Morty escaped by dint of his localized shield unit. He wasn't stupid. But, as he surveyed the ruins of his efforts, he realized that he was a bit on the naive side.

After renting a crappy apartment on the bad side of town, Morty got back to work.

The depression was hard to stave off. Morty took to visiting a bar before bed every night, let the alcohol seep into his brain while he glared at everyone laughing and living their tiny lives around him. When he bumped into a redhead, he apologized without even looking up. Her sudden exclamation made him look up.

It was Jessica.

Morty had never been so aware of how dirty and just generally unkempt he was, but the moment of self-consciousness passed and he was back to normal. So what if Jessica still looked fabulous? He had built a counterfeit money machine. And so what if she got more talkative and friendly the drunker she got, Morty was past all that high school stuff now, anyway. And so what if Jessica kept grabbing his ass, or that her tongue was sweet and warm in his mouth, or that she was clinging to him like she'd waited so long...

Jessica showed up his apartment a few weeks later and said she was pregnant. Morty blissfully agreed to marry her.

His project, which had lay neglected under a tarp these past few weeks, made the trip with them to the rental house. Jessica gave birth in June, and suddenly Morty had a family to provide for.

The project would occasionally get worked on, a part here or there, but he was too busy changing diapers to scavenge for parts. Anyway, to support Jessica and the baby(Beth, named after his mother) he took a series of odd jobs from the alien corporations that had begun popping up like toadstools. The work was unrewarding and took away from his home time, but he made himself do it. He didn't want to rest Jessica and Bethy's future on printed money.

Yes, he started drinking more.

Yes, Jessica and Beth started drifting away from him.

Yes, he couldn't think of a way to solve it, so he drank more.

Yes, one day little Beth got into the garage, pushed a random button, and blew a hole in the garage wall.

And as Morty yelled at her, he started shaking. Because he could calculate just how close Bethy had been standing to the blast, how close he had come to inadvertently incinerating his daughter.

Jessica came home to a note on the table and Bethy asleep in her crib.

Morty was miles away by that point. The truck he'd rented had the project on the back, tarp flapping in the wind.

The note had something about differences, with a small fortune in counterfeit bills pinned to the back. He could never explain the project to her. He couldn't explain it to himself, really. The drive to complete it had become its own reason, he had spent so much time on it already, he had to make it work.

It took years.

Years of taking illicit contracts from off-planet governments.

Years of test-runs aimed at sparsely-populated areas.

It had to work.

Had to.

The day came when Morty slotted one last circuit board into place. He took it to a hill overlooking his old town, now a spaceport.

He pressed a button.

The fizzle in his ears was not necessarily a sound, but the feeling of matter being torn apart. As the iridescent bubble engulfed his town and expanded, Morty flung out his arms.

 

The grass was prickly under his cheek. Morty blearily opened one eye, then shut it quickly. The world's worst hangover had nothing on this. His molars felt red-hot.

After a while he could sit up. And he did. And he looked down on his town.

It was a town again.

Causality had probably suffered, but Morty had bumped time back to before the aliens had come. And perhaps a little earlier.

Morty watched a finned Ford pass slowly down the street with a raised eyebrow.

Well, no matter. He could work on that, too.

He walked down to the small town, marveling at the ache in his limbs. He could see a park from this vantage point, and in it he could see small children playing. Suddenly, he saw a familiar face pop squealing from from the slide and run to a skirted figure.

Jessica had a different hairstyle and wore an old-fashioned dress, but Morty could recognize her from a thousand miles away. Bethy hid in her full skirt, laughing.

His wife and kid were here. Time really was fucked.

With no small amount of smugness, Morty descended.

He needed to get to the hardware store. And then maybe to a jewelry store. And possibly a toy store.

He had a lot to make up for.

When he saw the familiar outline, Morty almost collapsed in shock.

Through the hardware store window, Morty could spy the familiar spiky hairstyle, the slouching walk.

Of course! He had been thrown back in time, so Rick was probably here too. Morty could warn him, he didn't need the machine any more. He had a whole lifetime ahead.

Smiling broadly, Morty ran up to the store.

The figure ran with him.

And Morty came to a stop outside the window.

The reflection that stared back at him was not entirely unfamiliar. There were the crow's feet he had been getting lately. There was the scar on his chin from the exploding Erlenmeyer flask.

But on his head was something new.

Morty gingerly felt upwards, his reflection mimed the same, exploring his now-white hair standing on end.

As Morty looked at himself in the window, despair drained his heart.

He looked like Rick.

He looked like Rick.

He was in the past and he looked like Rick.

Mounting fear made Morty back away.

He was in the past and he looked like Rick and Jessica and Beth—

_Beth._

Morty let out a yell.

God, how had he not seen that?

Morty stood on the sidewalk and stared at a ghost. It was Rick. It was Rick.

He was Rick.

And the weight of all the ensuing years, all the things that had been kept from him, came crashing down.

Morty stared at himself.

“Wubba lubba dub dub,” he said bitterly.


End file.
